This book is a compendium of fantastical creatures from myth and folklore. Unlike its mediaeval equivalent, the bestiary, this is not to be read as moral allegory or as a practical handbook to be taken on journeys to the edge of the world. You won’t find advice here on how to learn from the industriousness of the bee, nor how to steer your ship clear of the path of an approaching sea serpent. ‘The Book of Imaginary Beings’ is intended rather as entertainment, an indulgence in what Jorge Luis Borges calls the “lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition”.

It is a slender book, just 150 pages or so. It could of course have been far longer, as Borges acknowledges in the preface of the 1967 edition:

“The title of this book would justify the inclusion of Prince Hamlet, of the point, of the line, of the surface, of n-dimensional hyperplanes and hypervolumes, of all generic terms, and perhaps of each one of us and the godhead. In brief, the sum of all things – the universe.”

I’m tempted to think that Borges enjoyed the idea of this book more than the finished thing itself – a bestiary of infinite length containing an infinite number of beings could easily have been a subject for one of his own short stories, which are full of such paradoxes and references to imaginary encyclopaedias (in fact, I wouldn’t put it past Borges to have slipped one or two creatures of his own in between the covers of this book). But Borges is not one to write at great length, let alone an infinite one, so he has drawn some necessarily arbitrary boundaries, which don’t include lines and hypervolumes; nor shape changers such as werewolves; nor many other famous creatures. It is a very personal choice, the author’s own intellectual curiosity guiding his foraging amongst the books in the Biblioteca National, and the selection is all the better for it.

Featured here are well known creatures such as the Dragon, the Phoenix, and the Minotaur, as well as lesser known ones, like the Squonk (“when cornered and escape seems impossible, it may even dissolve itself in tears”), and the Ass with Three Legs (“its coat is white, its food is spiritual, and its whole being is righteous”). The majority are from myth and folklore, though there are a handful of literary inventions present, like ‘An Animal imagined by Kafka’.

One of my favourites is the Monkey of the Inkpot (“four or five inches long; its eyes are scarlet and its fur is jet black, silky, and soft as a pillow”), which has a taste for India ink and sits on the desk beside those who write, waiting for them to finish. When the writer puts his pen down, the creature drinks what is left of the ink and sits back contentedly.

The Monkey of the Inkpot sitting on Borges’ desk must have been a very plump fellow indeed, for the author uses up very little ink in these short entries. That is not to say that they are cursory, for their brevity is a consequence of careful selection, clarity of thought and conciseness of phrase, not lack of research. There is in fact an enormous amount of research behind this book, it’s just that Borges spares us superfluous detail, giving us insight instead:

“Time has notably worn away the Dragon’s prestige. We believe in the lion as reality and symbol; we believe in the Minotaur as symbol but no longer reality. The Dragon is perhaps the best known but also the least fortunate of fantastic animals. It seems childish to us and usually spoils the stories in which it appears. It is worth remembering, however, that we are dealing with a modern prejudice, due perhaps to a surfeit of Dragons in fairy tales.”

This is undoubtedly the most erudite book you will ever read on the subject, but there’s none of the dry, uninspired writing that often accompanies academic rigour. Borges’ prose is witty and elegant, and a joy to read. Borges knows better than anyone else how reality, myth and fantasy intertwine and he clearly understands the nature of the beasts he writes about, identifying their varying shades of reality as nimbly as an entomologist identifying the shades of colour in butterflies. And though he reminds us that “the zoology of dreams is far poorer than the zoology of the Maker”, he makes us realise that many of these fantastical creatures are, in some ways, just as important:

“We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods. It is, so to speak, a necessary monster….”

The edition of this book that I own has a cover that perfectly encapsulates its contents. We are looking up a spiral staircase toward a painted ceiling of heaven, or perhaps looking down the staircase, to the floor of a forgotten library. Maybe even we are looking at a mirrored floor, which reflects a staircase above us. We could be on a stairway to the heavens; we could be an infinite spiral of thought; we could be the universe itself – a grain of sand in a painted spiral shell. I love the cover of this book as much as I love the words inside, precisely because it ‘is’ the words inside, but in a visual form.

(I love the back of this book also. There is another spiral there, this time in biro, a scribble made by my partner. I’m unsure whether she was just trying to get the ink in the pen to flow and the book was the nearest thing to hand, or whether she was drawing a spiral on a piece of paper, and the pen tore through. But I like the symmetry with the cover, and the fact that it’s her).

I used to carry this book with me everywhere, and I don’t think I would have done if its contents weren’t so succinctly summarised by its cover – because though I rarely read its contents, I need to be reminded of them. I need to be reminded that there are other people who see the world as I do, and I need to be reminded sometimes to look.

Borges considers fact to be inseparable from fiction. He is attracted to the philosophies, theologies and sciences of this world for their aesthetic value, not for any notion of truth. He takes an idea and extrapolates it to its logical conclusion, highlighting the tenuous relationship with ‘truth’ that the original idea held, while simultaneously enriching the world with the idea’s poetic potential, its uncertainties, and its mystery.

He is compared to Valery and to Poe, though to my mind his work has as much in common with science fiction. I think of the short story by Isaac Asimov in which a robot finds a way of committing murder without breaking its programmed Laws of Robotics – laws that should make the act of murder impossible. The way in which this apparent impossibility is revealed as possibility through an entirely logical series of developments, could be the work of Borges – though Borges would have made it a story about that mythical slave the Golem destroying its Cabalist master. And I suspect that had Borges indulged in hallucinogenic drugs rather than dusty libraries, he could well have written tales like Philip K Dick’s ‘Roog’, in which we are told of the daily theft of metal urns by alien invaders only to discover that we are in fact a dog watching the dustmen collect the bins.

‘Labyrinths’ contains a selection of Borges short stories, and some related essays. The short stories take up the bulk of the book, and contain many of his best (though the omission of ‘El Aleph’ is noticeable). Here we find ‘Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote’, in which Borges considers that hermeneutical problem of deciding who actually creates the meaning of a piece of writing – the writer or reader. In the story a modern reader of ‘Don Quixote’ sets about re-writing the book by living Cervantes life to the last detail before he writes it – the result being that “The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.” (Notice, incidentally, the phrase ‘almost infinitely’ – Borges chooses his words carefully).

Elsewhere we have ‘The Circular Ruins’, which deals with the dream within a dream, the narrative itself an endless cycle, ending as it begins. We have ‘Tlon, Qbar, Orbus Tertius’, a mock essay on a fictitious society, which amongst other things references fictitious books in its footnotes. And we have ‘The Library of Babel’, the search for the Book of Books. I won’t elaborate on them, as they only really make sense in their entirety, so dependent is their meaning on their form.

But I will tell you more about the parables at the back of the book, written when he was old and growing blind. They are just a page or so in length, the necessity to dictate them encouraging him to be even more concise than usual. These I read often, as for me these are the most interesting of all – paradoxically he seems to see clearer than ever in his blindness. Take his description of classical gods in ‘Ragnarok’, an account of a dream, if it indeed it was a dream (it may be purely invented, though the distinction is ultimately unimportant). The gods appear one day in the library, evidently having lost their humanity through years of exile:

“…low foreheads, yellow teeth…. thick bestial lips showed the degeneracy of the Olympian lineage. Suddenly we sensed they were playing their last card, that they were cunning, ignorant and cruel like old beasts of prey and that, if we let ourselves be overcome by fear or piety, they would finally destroy us.”

Borges can be dark, he can be playful, he can be pedantic. But he is always unmistakeably Borges. Or is he? My favourite piece in this book casts doubt even on that certainty, the author seeming to genuinely struggle to identify where Borges the person ends and Borges the writer begins:

“I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor…Years ago I tried to free myself of him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.”

There are stories in ‘Labyrinths’ that I still have not yet read. I know some passages inside out while others remained undiscovered. And I like it this way – after all, once I’ve been through all the passages, I must by definition have left the labyrinth – and I don’t think I want to ever do that.

Because I too like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee… and most of all I like the prose of Borges.